Koders Goes 'Pro'

Hoping to tap the midmarket, Koders Inc. recently released a Pro Edition of its source code search engine. Users can search version control systems behind the firewall either through a browser or from Visual Studio and Eclipse.

Koders Pro is set up to work with the open source CVS and Subversion repositories, but additional upgrades are needed to tap Visual SourceSafe, ClearCase, Perforce and other commercial products.

The company has a three-tier business model. The hope is that interested parties will try the firm's free Web site-based search engine for open source code, koders.com, on an experimental level. The new Pro offering represents a step up in functionality, but is not as feature-rich and is more affordable than the Enterprise Edition. "We really wanted to lower the barrier for adoption," says Koders founder and CEO, Darren Rush.

A code search engine can have a number of applications within enterprises, Rush says. For example, admins can scan codebases for potential risk factors, such as incidences of the word "password."

Heavy traffic
Right now, Koders.com receives 500,000 unique visitors each month, according to Rush. The site receives a lot of .edu Web traffic, he says, a fact that raises an interesting scenario around the question of code reuse -- a major reason for using a code search engine. "Plagiarism in the university is essentially productivity in the organization," he notes.

The company's crawling technology was "pretty much developed in-house," according to Rush. But for its indexing technology, Koders took the open source Lucene project and customized it for searching through source code.

In the future, Koders will look toward something far more ambitious than simple search: judging the quality of code. Right now, Koders employs cruder methods, such as popularity metrics. "We're going under the assumption that code that gets reused is better than code that never gets reused," he says.

Koders Pro costs $99 per user, per year. The company offers a 30-day free trial.